EDMOND—This spring, Wyoming Philadelphia Church of God member David Huddleston is preparing for the upcoming holy days. But 70 years ago, he was doing something very different. In the spring of 1944, he was shooting down Japanese airplanes over the Philippines. His days as a soldier during World War II may be long past, but on this sunny March morning, the Arkansas-born, Oklahoma-bred, Colorado- and Wyoming-fed veteran pauses and lets the memories of his 91 years come flooding back.

Upon arriving in Australia in 1943, Private First Class Huddleston saw a commanding officer standing further down the beach with several aides. It was one of America’s most famous military leaders: General Douglas MacArthur.

“I never really knew much about him until after the war,” Huddleston concedes, yet he was serving under, according to historian David McCullough, one of the most patriotic, courageous and important protagonists of the 20th century. MacArthur was the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific during World War II after Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and American air and land forces stationed in the Philippines. The Japanese pushed American and Filipino forces to Bataan and Corregidor Island. MacArthur, a lifelong friend of the Filipino people, was ordered to escape to Australia. When he arrived, he made his famous statement: “I came through, and I shall return.”

Under MacArthur, Huddleston’s unit helped end the brutal Japanese occupation of the Philippines. On one death march alone, the Japanese killed nearly 10,000 American and Filipino defenders.

Huddleston needs little prodding to share stories from his two years as an anti-aircraft gunner in Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. Many of his war experiences remain vivid in his mind.

He remembers fighting the Japanese on the beach, bombshells exploding in the sand all around him. “I heard this baby crying,” he remembers. “It was in one of those holes where a shell had exploded. It was trying to get out, but the beach was sandy. The officers lost track of it.”

Huddleston’s main weapon was the 90-mm M2 anti-aircraft battery, which fired a storm of timed-detonation ammunition 30,000 feet into the skies over Australia, New Guinea and the Philippines. He also blasted away at Japanese planes, and, whenever the opportunity arose, tanks and vehicles up to 50,000 feet away.

“We was just sitting out in the open and waiting for something to happen—we did a lot of that,” Huddleston says with a chuckle. “We had orders to fire at anything that flew by.”

He also remembers crouching beneath dirt and logs alongside his American comrades, aiming the battery down the mountain. The big gun fires on Japanese troops entrenched at the base. “We was just burying them alive,” he says softly, estimating that his unit killed Japanese troops by the hundreds. “That was our home for 21 days,” he says, and when they left, they saw “Japanese lying on both sides of the road.”

As the war in the Pacific died down, Huddleston was on hand for some of its most dramatic events. He was there when General MacArthur made his famous arrival in October 1944, wading ashore to tell the Filipinos, “I have returned.” Huddleston was also aboard the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, and watched the general preside over the Japanese surrender.

After returning from the service to Oklahoma, Huddleston received a welcome surprise. “I thought I’d go downtown,” he says, his words barely discernible over steady waves of laughter as he relives the moment, “and there she was. I didn’t have any idea of getting a woman. Some way or another, she just struck me.”

After marrying Ruth, Huddleston moved to Colorado to cut and strip timber. He trained a supposedly untamable horse to work in the thick wooded areas where the machinery couldn’t operate. He moved to Wyoming a few years later, where he worked at a uranium mine, as a janitor at an orphanage and as a trucker hauling nitrate to farms.

In General MacArthur, Huddleston encountered one of America’s most dynamic leaders. Now, he was about to encounter America’s preeminent religious broadcaster.

Huddleston and his wife heard Herbert W. Armstrong on the radio for the first time in the 1950s, after a neighbor recommended the World Tomorrow program. Each morning, they walked a quarter mile to their neighbor’s house to listen with him. Huddleston says he and his wife were hooked by Mr. Armstrong’s power, clarity and simplicity. They stayed tuned for the next 20 years.

The Huddlestons even tuned in while sitting in the Church of Christ parking lot in Rawlins, Wyoming, before Sunday services. During one of their regular parking lot radio sessions, a minister popped his head in the window and asked what they were doing. When he found out, he walked away befuddled.

In 1979, the Huddlestons left the Church of Christ and joined the Worldwide Church of God after studying the church’s 56-lesson Bible correspondence course together. A couple years later, they were baptized together. They came to the pcg in 1993. “We just stuck with it,” he says.

Huddleston now lives in a retirement home in the desert area of Rawlins. He spends his days studying the Bible and tinkering with his model railroad set. “Ain’t much to do around here,” he says, but he travels to a nearby lake three times a year to fish.

The firstborn of seven children, Huddleston also talks on the phone occasionally with his only living siblings: brother Washington “Warsh” Alexander and sister Pauline. He followed in his parents’ footsteps, raising nine children with his wife Ruth, including one adopted. Ruth died two years ago, but Huddleston still remembers her quiet nature and dedication to her family.

Huddleston is unable to attend weekly Sabbath services due to his distance from other pcg members, but he receives regular visits from the ministry, most often Preaching Elder Robert Locher. He regales his visitors with stories of war, faith and family.

“I have found him to be very pleasant, cordial and knowledgeable,” Regional Director Brian Davis said. “He also has quite the sense of humor!”

Before hanging up the phone and returning to the activity in the retirement home lounge, Huddleston says something ironic, considering the wealth of stories he has just divulged: “I was always a quiet guy;” he says, “wouldn’t have anything to say.”